A Hero's Journey Through Science Fiction

Where Memes Really Come From

“There are two interesting points that Dawkins makes about memes that are worth considering in light of how “meme” evolved into lolcats. First, he emphasizes very strongly that memes are not subject to the same rules of selection that genes are. A meme does not have to aid in human survival in order for it to replicate. A successful meme is copied from one brain to another, perhaps billions of times over thousands of years, for what Dawkins calls “psychological” reasons. Second, he describes the competition between memes by talking about computers — a pretty prescient move in the mid-1970s when he was writing The Selfish Gene. Memes compete for our attention and memory the way programs compete for valuable time on computers (he was probably thinking of a mainframe, where users would queue up programs to run sequentially, due to the machine’s limited processor power).” — io9.com